A Cheese That Will Change Your Life

It doesn’t matter if you like blue cheese or not, once you’ve tried Blue Haze you will be changed forever. This heavenly cheese starts out as a simple Quebec blue until Cole Snell and his team at Provincial Fine Foods bring it to Ontario and subject it to a cold smoking process.

The cheese is made in Quebec by the only monastic cheesemakers in Canada. Once shipped to Ontario it gets aged for a month to remove excess moisture. “The small amount of heat in the cold-smoking process will crack the cheese.” says Cole Snell, “we smoke it for an hour, then vacuum seal and age it for another month to let the smoke really penetrate the cheese. My favourite way to eat it is with honey or chocolate.”

Chocolate! Sounds crazy. In fact Cole has been experimenting with blue cheese and chocolate for awhile now and is currently selling Chocolate Truffles stuffed with Blue Benedictine cheese at his Church Street shop. He hasn’t tried the Blue Haze in the recipe yet, but is thinking about it.

If you’d like to try these truffles, drop by the Drake on Monday night for some free samples during the Bin End sale ($5 glasses of wine) in the lounge.

For now our favourite way to use the Blue Haze is in a salad and this recipe especially. It was a real hit over the holidays.

Blue Haze Beet Salad

Ingredients

4 beets, peeled and steamed or roasted

1 bunch purple watercress

1 grapefruit, cut into segments, juice reserved

wedge of Blue Haze crumbled

1/4 cup shallot, minced

red wine vinegar

olive oil

salt & pepper

Steps

Clean the watercress and segment the grapefruit.

Mix up a vinaigrette with the oil, red wine vinegar, shallots & some of the reserved grapefruit juice.

Toss the cress & grapefruit with the vinaigrette and spread out on a platter.

Slice the beets and toss with the vinaigrette, arrange the beets on top of the cress.